DAYS 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 & 21: An Imminent, Staggering Plastic Baggering Strait

It has been a bizarre but uneventful MASH-tober. The challenge persists, but yields little. Last night, it was warmer so I left the windows open and over the strains of "Boris"' mashing, I heard my downstairs neighbours living and boozing it up into the wee small horas. The alley often sports broken bottles hurled there by Westmount teens or poor recyclers. Perhaps, the lag and unHalloweenliness of the season owe to climate change? In which case, as I noted last time, Monster Masher Bobby Pickett may have hoped on a much more prescient bandwagon when he turned to the Mashing Climate Change with his swan song, the Climate Mash.

Which reminded me that as I was sitting here working at the computer in front the dark alleyway between mine and the building next door, a plastic bad fell straight down, parachute-like, from on high, perfectly in my line of vision. The sky was literally raining plastic bag. It was an American Beauty moment, but it made for a dirty alleyway.

The warm air, the plastic bag, broken bottles, and the mutant squirrel... all of this reminds me of something which leads to something else:

The Vortex of Garbage in the North Pacific Ocean.

I don't remember if Al Gore told me (and 20,000 other people) about this when he spoke in Montreal in March, but it is alternately known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the Eastern Garbage Patch or the Pacific Trash Vortex, but I'm partial to Vortex of Garbage. It forms around the North Pacific Gyre, which is apparently the system of currents tugging at the world's oceans. The currents in turn deposit vast amounts of garbage into the North Pacific, and this semi-buoyant trash heap is currently about the size of Texas.

What this means, I cannot be sure, but I have visions of a distopic future (there's seldom any other kind in the waking imagination) in which a Bering Straight is filled in again with trash, allowing a motley of Americans to walk back to Asia across a pile of dirty tennis shoes, Huey Lewis albums, computer monitors, discarded tubes of petroleum jelly, and other non-biodegradable remnants of human civilization. Eventually, humankind or whatever's left of it will settle the vortex, perhaps breeding Great Pacific Garbage Pale Kids and later, a system of government will evolve there after centuries of warfare for the heaps, but right now it's just a slowly swirling pile of garbage. That's terrible.

I'd like some suggestions for following up. Can anyone direct me towards:

- a cultural histories of plastic (chronicling varied cultural attitudes towards plastic from the fifties to present)
- Climate Mash, where can one hear it?
- Where the last 13 days went?

LINKS:

Ocean Secrets

North Pacific Gyre

Across the Pacific Ocean, plastics, plastics, everywhere

Greenpeace's piece on it

The Original Bering Strait

Garbage

Day 4: duly noted

LISTENING CONTEXT: on a bus, people around, sadly mashing

Day 3: Monster Sociality = Music Sociality

LISTENING CONTEXT: bus stop, starring up at the crest with an old Packard logo in it waiting for a bus

Okay, I know that yesterday I said that the Monster Mash was isolating, but here's a shocking fact: the monsters are having fun. Despite their monstrosity, and the implicit social stigma attached to that, they seem to be getting along, mashing.... At the same time, the musicians on the record genuinely seem to be having fun too--it's a party record, and it sounds like a party! There are few party records I can think of that don't--it was 1962, Lesley Gore's bad time party records came the following year, and synthesizers were several years away. Party records underline the role of sociality in pop music. The lyrics bring that home. Even if Leon Russell's piano sounds like its having it's own little party in a closet somewhere, away from the rhythm section, and everything is super compartmentalized on the recording--and parties often involved stuffing Leon Russell in a closet.


As I was listening to it, I thought about another great dance party record (and one I'd listened to a few minutes earlier): Quarter to Three by Gary US Bonds. The record sounds like a party was happening in the studio, and I think part of the genre's appeal is in conveying that sense of partiness. His New Orleans is another great example. Which, as I've been learning recently ties into the fun of actually playing music with other people. Which is a social phenomena. However, it also explains, going back to yesterday, why listening to other people's good time together can be so isolatin' when you're walking through Westmount.

Also, whatever became of Packard cars?

Day 2: Mash Indifference

LISTENING CONTEXT: walking along Ste Cath West, near Greene, random. slightly on purpose (ipodishly)

Today, twice, swimming through an afternoon crowd along a busy sidewalk. Face after unsmiling face passed me by unaware that the grin (I had, beaming myselfishly), which seemed to be making everyone uncomfortable began with the sound of science bubbles at the beginning of the Monster Mash. Nothing highlights the nakedly subjective nature of pop music listening in the 21st Century like the scorn of strangers at your enjoying it. Otherwises, I heard Lucretia MacEvil by Blood Sweat and Tears twice today, too. Equally silly, equally isolating.

Day 1: Mash Good!

So begins my immersion in Mash-dom as I enter the THIRTY-ONE DAY MONSTER MASH CHALLENGE, a self-imposed experiment in which I will listen to Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s the Monster Mash every day for the month of October, 2007, AD., and record whatever I am able to produce as a result of it.

Why do this?

Well, my experience has led me to believe that there is something compulsive built into the academic mindset—a mindset I am trying to feign. I’m partly trying to reconnect with that. I’m reminded of an older age of clerical pedagogy that required hand copying of canonical works. This led to such bizarre sentences as “there’s no Ecclesiastes like Gary’s Ecclesiastes.” (Evidentally, Gary had poise and remarcable penmanship).

I’ve even seen instructional manuals from as recent as the 1980s recommending that aspiring writers copy the great works of Western Literature (oddly all written by Great Men) out by hand so that one can get the feeling of having written a Great Work. I know Hunter S. Thompson claimed to have re-typed works by Fitzgerald and Hemmingway, and hand copying the works of Shakespeare was once quite common. (I heard comedian George Carlin explain that his maternal grandfather had done this.)

This old school self-publishing was about self-improvement and education by imitation. The subject is supposed internalize these external models. But I think there’s something more fundamental going on. I can remember hand writing the lyrics to all of the songs on the Beatles’ Red & Blue LPs when I was 11. I did it because I really liked the songs.

My ambition is to write one amazingly annoyingly catchy pop song and live off the resulting multimedia franchise until my great-grandchildren are all dead. That’s precisely what Bobby “Boris” Pickett did and there is something that has always fascinated me about the curious notion of being able to base an entire career on just one thing—the true one-trick pony. The Vaudeville stage was made up of act after act who would essentially hone a single five to ten minute routine into its perfect form over their entire careers.



The challenge is not about the Monster Mash. It doesn’t need commentary. As the Igor says, mash good! My important work is an exercise in purpose-driven purposelessness. It’s a spiritual journey through specific culturally-ubiquitous media to arrive at… well, we shall see…

Which is why, each day for the entire month of October, I will listen to the Monster Mash at least twice every day, and record my observations. I’ll try to get out and get into increasingly bizarre circumstances so that the Mash has the potential of altering my perception of the world. I’ll turn over lyrics in my mind and unpack, deconstruct, disenfranchise, and do violence to it, until I get somewhere. Bear with me!

This will be the first time I've ever attempted to do this when it is seasonally appropriate. Depending on how it goes, in December, I can begin my month long observance of the same basic experiment with Christmas Don't Be Late, I will expect to have learned a great deal about human endurance. January, I could do No Scrubs by TLC.

LISTENING CONTEXT: 3:00-3:15 PM EST, my apartment, on purpose

Peripheral. I put it on four times while I was doing mundane school work. It was not profound. I was struck by how tame it sounds-—how profoundly non-threatening, for a song about Monsters, mashing. It is kinda-goofy, and Leon Russell plays the piano.

I had intended to wake up to the Monster Mash this morning, but I forgot when I was setting my alarm that the first track on that Halloween CD is The Who’s version of Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” That was loud.

Go FURTHER: for starters, take a look at the official webpage of the late Bobby “Boris” Pickett. He made a career out of the Monster Mash, and much of it is evident here.